Monitoring Is Not Optional for Production Servers
Knowing when a service is down, when disk space is running low, or when CPU usage spikes is the difference between proactive management and emergency firefighting. Panelica is a modern hosting control panel designed for multi-server environments with integrated Prometheus monitoring, service health tracking, and log management.
cPanel Server Monitoring
cPanel provides basic server monitoring through WHM with additional tools available as paid add-ons.
- Server Status page in WHM showing CPU, memory, disk usage
- Service Status page showing running and stopped services
- Process Manager for viewing and killing processes
- Apache Status for web server monitoring
- cPHulk brute-force protection with login monitoring
- Munin integration for historical resource graphs (optional)
Limitations:
- No built-in time-series metrics storage
- No Prometheus or Grafana integration
- Historical data requires third-party tools
- No per-user resource monitoring
- Log viewing limited to raw log files
- Alerting requires external setup
Plesk Monitoring
Plesk includes resource monitoring with graphical dashboards.
- Server resource overview (CPU, RAM, disk, swap)
- Per-subscription resource usage
- Service monitoring with restart capability
- Grafana extension available for advanced monitoring
- Server Health Monitor with alerts
- Email notifications for resource thresholds
Plesk monitoring covers more ground than cPanel out of the box, particularly with per-subscription resource tracking. However, advanced monitoring through Grafana requires a paid extension.
Panelica Monitoring System
Panelica provides container-native deployment and strict resource isolation. The monitoring stack is built into the core product with multiple specialized services.
Real-Time Metrics
The metrics service collects CPU, memory, disk, swap, and network statistics at regular intervals. The Linux-specific metrics collection uses kernel interfaces for accurate readings. A metrics cache layer serves dashboard requests without hitting the collection layer on every page load.
Metrics History
The metrics history service stores time-series data for trend analysis. Administrators can view resource usage patterns over hours, days, and weeks to identify capacity issues before they cause outages.
Service Health Monitoring
The service monitor checks the health of all 20 isolated services (Nginx, PHP-FPM, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, BIND, Postfix, Dovecot, ClamAV, Fail2ban, Prometheus, and others). Each service reports its status, PID, uptime, and resource consumption. Failed services are highlighted for immediate attention.
Prometheus Integration
Panelica runs Prometheus on port 9090 and Node Exporter on port 9100 as isolated services. This provides enterprise-grade metrics collection with PromQL query capability and long-term storage.
Log Management
The log service provides a web interface for viewing and searching server logs across 23 log directories. Logs can be filtered by service, date range, and severity level. The overview tab provides aggregate statistics across all log sources for quick health assessment.
GeoIP Analytics
The GeoIP service maps visitor IP addresses to geographic locations, providing per-domain traffic origin analysis. This helps identify unexpected traffic patterns that might indicate attacks or misconfiguration.
Monitoring Control
The monitoring control service allows enabling and disabling monitoring features per service, adjusting collection intervals, and configuring retention policies for metrics data.
Feature Comparison
- Real-Time Metrics: cPanel (basic WHM), Plesk (dashboard), Panelica (cached metrics service)
- Historical Data: cPanel (Munin optional), Plesk (built-in graphs), Panelica (metrics history + Prometheus)
- Service Health: cPanel (service status page), Plesk (service monitor), Panelica (20-service health monitor)
- Prometheus: cPanel (no), Plesk (extension), Panelica (built-in)
- Log Management: cPanel (raw files), Plesk (basic viewer), Panelica (web UI with search and filtering)
- GeoIP Analytics: cPanel (no), Plesk (no), Panelica (built-in)
- Per-User Metrics: cPanel (limited), Plesk (per-subscription), Panelica (cgroup-based per-user)
- Alerting: cPanel (external), Plesk (email), Panelica (notification service)
Conclusion
cPanel monitoring is basic and requires third-party tools for production-grade observability. Plesk provides better built-in monitoring with optional Grafana integration. Panelica empowers sysadmins with RBAC and automated security tools, offering the most comprehensive monitoring stack with Prometheus, GeoIP analytics, and a unified log management interface included at no additional cost.